Are Koreans the Irish of Asia? Here’s a Case

Eamonn McKee, the Irish ambassador to the Koreas, had heard the saying before he came to Seoul in 2009 – that Koreans are the Irish of Asia – but only after getting here did he begin to think it might be true.

“I think it might have been originally coined by an English woman to insult both of us,” Mr. McKee said. “You know, that we’re both emotional and entertaining and unruly and et cetera. We now both wear it as a badge of pride.”

The Wall Street Journal

Amb. Eamonn McKee, in his Seoul office this month.

Some people may also see that as a bit of code for a love for beer in both countries and the ease that both Koreans and Irish have finding a reason to drink it.

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Mr. McKee is in the news this week because, after more than a year of ground work, a delegation of leaders
in the joint government of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland is in Seoul to share lessons from a peace process that took more than two decades.

For the South Koreans, Ireland’s political reconciliation is not something that has been given much attention or thought. But the scope of issues that the Irish peace process tackled may come to influence what is studied at the agencies, institutions and academics working on Korean unification – as well as the strategies that are considered by policymakers.

Shortly after Mr. McKee arrived, he was asked to give a speech at the Asia Society Korea Center to an audience of South Koreans, diplomats and expat businesspeople. Being so new in Seoul, he didn’t know what to talk about so he decided to ruminate on the Koreans-are-Irish cliché.

“I listed off all the things we have in common to start,” he said in an interview last week. “Obviously I came to the rice-paper screen of Korean culture and Confucianism and, clearly, there’s a difference there.”

But as he dug in with research, he quickly realized there are more connections than seem immediately obvious.

“I was quite surprised when you make the list of what we have in common. It’s quite formidable actually,” Mr. McKee said. He added, “Inevitably, you look at all of things and say ‘Gee.’”

Here’s the ambassador’s take:

“You’ve got two small countries, Ireland and Korea, who are surrounded by big powers and have retained their national identity over many, many centuries despite being buffeted by these powers and the power politics of their regions.

“Two countries that were colonized quite dramatically. In our case, for 800 years. In the Korean case, successively by different influences but really quite dramatically from the 1890s onward.

“Then you had an interesting situation where Korean nationalist intellectuals looked to the Ireland model about how you resist and being influenced by our national theater, for example. And you had Japanese nationalists looking to London to find out how do you suppress resistance and how do you create empire.

“You then have two countries that are poor up until recently and rapidly become modernized, but still the rural, folkloric agricultural background is very close. Most of our parents or grandparents would have come from farms. You still have these older kind of approaches to life, interest in people and village talk.

“And then you get to partition, dealing with partition and the legacy of history.

“You look at the relationship between Korea and Japan, for example, and the relationship between Ireland and England. Now I would hold that, through the peace process in Northern Ireland, we have forged a very close bond of friendship with Britain. This was the reason for the success of Queen Elizabeth’s recent visit, for example. I think we’re very much ahead of Korea and Japan in terms of reconciling and having put history in its proper place, which is in the rear-view mirror. But still there are parallels there, unresolved issues of the past.”